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Astrophotography

Lambda Orionis and Banard 30
Jeffrey McClure

This was, I believe, the most challenging image to capture and process I have ever done. The star and star cluster Lambda Orionis (Meissa) are on the right side of the image. The mass of the very weakly emitting nebula is on the east side of the Lambda Orionis Ring (LDN 1584), centered at 05:31:08.7201529 +09:58:15.120909. In this image, North is down, as I wanted to bring out the relief tableau of Barnard 30. I located B-30 at the bottom of the image because it looks to me like a little monk confronting a dragon arising from the mist. One image is in the Hubble Palette with Hydrogen-alpha mapped to green (SHO), while the other has the H-alpha mapped to red (SHO). I have also included a detailed blowup of Barnard 30 in SHO with much of the saturation removed to better see the tableau of the monk and the dragon's head emerging from the mist.


The image is composed of ten hours of 300-second light exposures plus appropriate darks and flats in a 1x2 matrix through 7nm ZWO NB 36mm filters captured using an Askar V telescope in its 60mm aperture configuration with its 0.7 reducer, producing a 270mm focal length, a ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro camera with the sensor cooled to -20 degrees C, using an Askar 120mm guidescope with an ASI120MM guide camera, EAF auto focuser, AM5 Harmonic Mount, all controlled with an ASIAIR+, scope mounted computer via an iPad mini from my backyard here in Bortle 5, Salado. Processing was primarily done (about 20 times!) in PixInsight and then Adobe Lightroom Classic for final color alignment.




I captured the data in mid-January, but it took me eight months to coax enough signal out of it to make this image.

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